First responders such as emergency medical service (EMS) workers, police officers or firefighters deployed at an incident scene have limited connectivity to hospitals and other places remote from the incident scene. In particular, first responders have limited connectivity to the emergency room (ER) of the hospital to which they are delivering and do not know the status of the ER, nor does the ER know their status. Adding to this the fact that only limited medical information, if any, can be passed backward and forward between the first responders and the hospital, the ER treatment typically starts with a patient assessment when the emergency vehicle arrives at the hospital, instead of being a continuous process from the moment when the first responders arrive at the incident scene.
Furthermore, the incident scene may encompass multiple casualties who have to be triaged and stabilized on-site if their number threatens to overwhelm the first responders. Those who are beyond hope and those who will survive without treatment take backstage to those where treatment makes a difference for survival.
In addition, the incident scene itself may be hazardous, both to the casualties and to the first responders. Unknown or undetected conditions or changes therein at the incident scene may present serious risks for both the casualties and the first responders.
While certain technologies have been developed to assist first responders, they are unsatisfactory in many respects. For example, existing technologies are typically point solutions and lack in terms of an integrated approach which takes into account information from a variety of sources. Also, existing technologies tend to not be rapidly deployable (i.e., seconds, not minutes or hours) and are thus often of limited effectiveness where time is crucial. Furthermore, while it may often be useful to know where the first responders and/or the casualties are located, existing technologies may only provide inadequate or insufficient precision in locating them (e.g., civilian grade global positioning system (GPS) technology typically offers accuracies of about 9 to 15 meters (30 to 50 feet), due to the user equivalent range errors (UEREs) of ionospheric effects, ephemeris errors, satellite clock errors, multipath distortion, and tropospheric effects).
Accordingly, there is a need for solutions facilitating a first response mission at an incident scene, and particularly for solutions providing first responders with bidirectional communication capability, real-time support for their information needs, and knowledge about their environment as they stabilize and transport patients under what may be hazardous conditions, solutions enabling the patients to be monitored, and solutions enabling precise location of the first responders and patients at the incident scene.